Let’s imagine that there is a new craft, and that it is called “replacing”. Let’s imagine an unemployed man who would practice such craft every day. So much so, that he would actually work beyond measure, and that he would be, in his own way, a happy man. All he does is take on, for a few hours, the role of absentees who duck – for more or less serious reasons, their official occupation. He makes do with just enough, our hero, because money isn’t everything in life: one needs to keep in shape, and not letting oneself go in times of, how to say, dark crises. More

Sandro is a forty-something teacher and still lives with his parents, who constantly meddle in his private life. He shows little interest in the blind dates his friend Iva pressures him to go on. On an outing to the Black Sea, he falls in love with the hairdresser Manana. When her husband Tengo is released from jail early, Sandro’s predicament takes on absurd dimensions. He gets caught up in wild family disputes and feels compelled to move Natia, pregnant with Tengo’s child, into his parents’ home. More

Luna and Amar are a couple. Their relationship is under great strain. First of all, Amar loses his job for being drunk at work. Luna is very worried and haslittle hope of realising her fragile dream of having a child with Amar. But her fears for their future increase when Amar takes on a well-paid job in aMuslim community hours away from where they live.Only after quite some time has elapsed during which they have had no contact with each other, is Luna allowed to visit Amar in this community of conservative Wahhabis in its idyllic lakeside location. More

After having spent many years in Germany, Ahmad returns to his native Iran for a holiday. His friends from his student days organise a three-day breakon the Caspian Sea. One of the party, a fun-loving woman named Sepideh takes the matter in hand. Unbeknown to the rest of the group, she has alsoinvited a young woman named Elly, who is a nursery school teacher at her daughter’s kindergarten. Ahmad has just emerged from an unhappy marriage and is now divorced from his German wife. More

Carla and Luciano are a happy couple, exuding the joys of love. One morning, Luciano, a geologist, sets off on a work trip, and then seems to disappear into thin air. . . His worried wife, unable to find any trace of him, sets off to find him in the tiny village in Patagonia he was supposed to be going to. There she meets Luis, who looks just like Luciano, an estate agent married to another woman. Convinced this man could be her husband, Carla tries all kinds of strategies to get closer to him. But the man does not recognise her. More

Juan Desouza is a 38 years old argentinean businessman, whose life is going to change after a simple business trip: having arrived at the destination, he realizes that the man that sits next to him is dead. Thereupon he decides to adopt the identity of his neighbour, to create himself a new job, find a new apartment and to possibly not return to his own life. Suddenly Juan experiences nature as an adventure, discovering his senses and instincts. And after all new perspectives open up: His previous life suddenly isn't the only possibility anymore... More

"Be with me" consists of three stories of love vs. solitude: there is an aging, lonesome shopkeeper who doesn't believe in life any more since his wife died. But he is saved from desperation by reading an autobiographical book and meeting its author, a deaf and dumb lady of his own age. Then there is Fatty, a security guard in his fifties who lives for two things: good food and love for a pretty executive living in his block of flats. But, if it is easy to satisfy his first need winning the heart of the distant belle is a horse of another color. More

Mamadi is struggling to complete a doctorate at a Parisian university after the government of his country has stopped paying his scholarship. Thanks to his acquaintances in the African community, he finds a job as night watchman in an underground car park. There, a French colleague, Franck, helps the friendly African academic getting around. However, the car park is also a meeting point for dubious characters, and when Mamadi accidentally wrecks a drug trafficking operation, Franck is really hard-pressed to put his pal and himself out of harm's way. Wouldn't Mamadi's home country be the ideal place to escape the gangsters' wrath? More

This is Ariel's world: the small, slightly seedy shopping center in downtown Buenos Aires, where the Italian shopkeepers scream all day, the Koreans sell feng-shui and old Osvaldo sells nothing. Where Ariel's mother runs a lingerie shop and his brother deals in import-export. It's a comfortable little world, in spite of an undercurrent of malaise and uncertainty. Many young people are looking their immigrant roots to obtain a coveted foreign passport, the key to a world full of promise. Ariel, however, wants more than a passport from Poland, where his grandparents fled to escape the Holocaust. More

In Buenos Aires, a few days before traveling to Spain with his beloved wife Liliana Rovira to visit their son Pedro, the leftist Literature professor Fernando Robles is compulsory retired in the University, and he concludes that it is impossible to live with his pension. The crisis in Argentina does not allow Fernando to get a new job, and his wife decides to sell her family's apartment and move to a small farm near Villa Dolores to reduce their expenses. Fernando comes up with the idea to grow lavender and sell the oil to the perfume industry. More

It might take two viewings to grasp fully what Fernando Pérez is doing in "Suite Habana," an elusive but intermittently beautiful tone poem on film. There is virtually no dialogue. There are no story lines that build to a climax, no documentary-style voice-overs. There are just snippets from a day in Havana, so disjointed and seemingly random that it takes a while to realize that Mr. Pérez is focusing on 10 specific individuals, tracking them through 24 hours in their painfully ordinary lives. More

Jorge Furtado's debut feature, Houve Uma vez Dois Verões (Two Summers), is about a teenager who learns some hard truths about life. Teenager Chico (André Arteche) wants to lose his virginity during a family vacation. Roza (Ana Maria Mainieri) becomes his willing partner. Months later, Roza finds Chico and demands money so that she can get an abortion. Chico learns that she is lying to him, but he also realizes he still cares for her. More

The 20-year-old narrator André (Lázaro RamosI, relatively poor, falls in love with Silvia, a neighbor whom he spy's with a telescope. Becoming more and more attracted to her, he begins to follow her around the city and realizes she works in a clothing shop. He works in a xerox place and makes a copy of a brand new 50 real bill in order to buy a dress from her store. This becomes a vice and he begins to photocopy more and more money, until it gets out of control. However, things begin to go wrong when he decides that photcopying is not the only way to make money... More

Tunis in present days of 2002. After the death of her husband, Lilia's life revolves solely around her teenage daughter, Salma. Whilst she's looking for Salma late one night, attractive Lilia stumbles upon a belly dance cabaret and though initially reserved and taken aback by the culture of the place, Lilia gets consistently drawn back to it. Shy first and reserved towards the night-life-scenery she becomes friend with one of the belly dancers and is encouraged into dancing for the audience. At the same time Lila starts a romance with one of the cabaret's musicians, who unbeknown to both of them, is also romancing her daughter Salma. More

SANDUICHE (SANDWICH, in Portuguese) is a mind-bender mix of detailed character profiles, multiple points of view, and the art of cooking. But most of all, SANDWICH is wonderful because of Jorge Furtado's ability to tell a story in a way that changes entirely our perspective in each turn of the story. Here this master proves that making a movie could be just like cooking a meal - you blend flavors to create something unique. That's what makes SANDWICH so appealing - the way Furtado creates a story that changes its "flavor" every time. More

The Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang shows in his film Yi Yi - A One and a Two the life of a family in modern Taipei. NJ is a man in his mid-forties. He is married, a father of two children and successful in his job - still he is no longer happy with himself and with his life. While NJ starts seing his old flame again his mother-in-law is in a coma. It is NJ's eight year old son who guides us through everyday life of the family and who asks critical questions and surprises the spectators with his experiments in the water. The older sister has her first experiences with love and learns that one can not force felicity. More

Oliveiro is a young poet living in Buenos Aires where sometimes he has to sale his ideas to an advertising agencie in order to make a living or exchange his poems for a steak. One night he meets a prostitute in a bar in Montevideo. Her name is Ana and soon he falls in love with her. Back in Buenos Aires, he accepts a contract with a publicity agencie to get the money for three days of love with her. Will he get what his searching for when his ideal of love's pleasure is literaly going in levitation while making love? More

The Hirayamas travel from their hometown of Onomichi to Tokyo tovisit their adult children. But the younger generation make them feelmore in the way than welcome. It also emerges that their son’s career asa doctor and their daughter’s as a hairdresser are nowhere near as successfulas the couple were led to believe from afar. The only one whoreally makes an effort to spend time with them is their daughter-in-law,Noriko, the widow of the Hirayama’s son who went missing in the war. More